


small infinities

by aesphantasmal



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: M/M, Other, S3 era, soft jupeter, space existentialism, very sappy, written at 3AM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22487185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesphantasmal/pseuds/aesphantasmal
Summary: Juno had never quite realised how big space was.
Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Comments: 8
Kudos: 69





	small infinities

**Author's Note:**

> it is 3am i havent properly proofread this but i have to post it so god will let me sleep  
> i just love space man

Juno had never quite realised how big space was.

He’d heard facts and figures before, of course. The diameter of the Sun was 200 times bigger than Mars’, and the distance between them was another 150 times bigger than the radius of the Sun, and Pluto was 25 times further out than Mars. The nearest star was 4 light years away and the galaxy was 50,000 light years across and these were things Juno had heard before, but had never really even begun to understand until he got off of Mars, until he sat looking out of the windows of the Carte Blanche as it drifted through space. Looking out into the billions upon billions of bright spots in the sky, Juno couldn’t tell you what was what.

“Rita?” She looked up from the other sofa, where she’d been doing something on her comms.

“Yeah, boss?”   
“How far away are we from Mars?”

“I think Captain A said we just passed 10 light years?”

Juno nodded to acknowledge he’d heard her, even as he kept staring out of the window. They were barely two star systems away from the Solar system, and yet if he somehow found a way to look at Mars, at Hyperion, he’d be looking it before Newtown and the Theias and before Miasma, before Juno had met almost everyone on this ship, before he’d even turned thirty. There were not many  _ things _ between Juno and the place he had lived his whole life up until now, but there was so much  _ distance _ that Juno was getting a headache thinking about it.

It wasn’t until a hand was waved into his field of vision that Juno realised that anyone but him and Rita was in the room, let alone trying to get his attention. He looked away from the window, and realised that Nureyev was standing in front of him. Looking around, the rest of the crew seemed to have entered while he was lost in thought.

“Juno? Are you alright?”   
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Juno replied. 

“Do you mind if I sit with you?” Nureyev asked. Juno nodded. As he sat down, Nureyev scrutinised the window, like he was trying to tell what Juno had been looking at.

“Space sure is, uh, empty, huh,” Juno said, not being able to think of intelligent conversation on another topic.

“I suppose it’s called space for a reason,” Nureyev responds, an eyebrow raised. “Is there any particular reason for this, or...?”

Juno made a noncommittal noise, leant against Nureyev and went back to staring out the window. But now, as he stared out into the galaxy and the universe beyond, he heard the light chattering of the rest of the Carte Blanche crew, and the warmth from Nureyev next to him.

“I never realised how many stars you could see out here,” Juno said, after what might have been a minute or might have been an hour.

“Hmm?” Nureyev said, running a hand through Juno’s hair.

“In Hyperion you can’t really see anything. Maybe it’s the domes, maybe it’s all the lights, maybe it’s the floating mansions, but I don’t remember seeing more than a few stars in the sky at once.”

“I did notice when I was there.” He paused for a second, then said, more quietly, so Juno could barely hear, “On the surface of Brahma, sometimes you couldn’t see any stars. Hard for much of a view of the night sky to get past a floating city.” Juno reached for Nureyev’s free hand, and squeezed it tight for a second. He felt Nureyev do the same a second later.

“I guess you get used to being so far away from everything,” Juno said, after a brief, comfortable silence.

“It took me a while. Not helped by the… circumstances under which I left Brahma, of course. I’ve always found it comforting, though.”

“Why?”

“Search one city for a man, you could be searching for hours. A planet could take days or months, depending on what city or planet and what person. Search the galaxy, and, well, there’s quite a few more places to look. Lose someone once, and they’re going to have considerable trouble finding you again. I’m sure you can see the practical benefits of it.”

“Pretty sure someone who wanted to find me could still find me halfway across the galaxy if I pissed them off enough.”

Nureyev laughed. “I wouldn’t test the theory, but I think it might be harder than you think. You do appear to draw people’s attention, for better or for worse, but I was given the impression that with a tendency to find trouble that’s not a difficult thing to do in Hyperion.”

“If you don’t end up dead, sure.” Juno surveyed the stars again. “It’s just weird being so far away from Hyperion that I can’t see which star is the Sun anymore. Like, almost everyone I know, everywhere I lived or worked before now, almost every thing I did - all just look tiny now.” And maybe that was freeing. With the vast scale of the universe, there was only so bad Juno could mess up. He could act like he had the whole weight of Hyperion or Mars on his shoulders, but he couldn’t even conceive that the infinite expanse of tiny pinpricks of light in the distance were all dependent on him. How many stars even was that? A billion? A trillion? A quadrillion? Juno didn’t know. But still, as he stared out, he was very aware of the tiny size of their spaceship against everything else in the universe.

“If there’s so much out there, Nureyev, how do we know we matter?” Juno asked. Nureyev looked concerned for a second. “Well, you certainly matter as far as I’m concerned, Juno. And while I’m still not sure what happened with the Theias, it sounds like you and Rta helped a lot of people.”

“It was mostly Rita.”

“Regardless, there are many people who you matter to, even if the universe is unconcerned.”

“Huh. Guess so.” Juno was still looking out of the window, but rather than just seeing the expanse of space, he could hear Rita’s excited chatter and the crinkling of her crisp packets as she explained the plot of her most recent stream binge to Jet, who occasionally asked questions, while Buddy and Vespa laughed and joked softly in the background, all while he felt the rise and fall of Nureyev’s breathing and heard his heartbeat. Maybe the universe was big, bigger than Juno could even begin to imagine, but maybe that didn’t need to matter. Not when Juno knew what really mattered to him.


End file.
